Another month has gone by, which means a lot of new features are ready for you.

This month's release notes include:

For web:

For the Planday app:

The login page gets another fresh look this year to include a Cookies acceptance policy and to bring you a simpler, faster, and more accessible way to get your day started in Planday.

The cookies acceptance policy is part of our ongoing efforts to ensure compliance and to be transparent about data usage.

The cookie policy banner includes a link where you can learn more about what cookies are needed and used for, also available here. Every 3 months, the same banner will appear on your login screen, so you can review the policy on a regular basis.

Once you click OK, you'll be able to log in as usual.

Starting with the Employees list, we're adding an element of pagination to the way lists are handled in Planday. This means that lists will now load faster and will be divided into pages, of a max. 40 entries / page.

This is already in place for your list of employees, under People > Employees, where you can browse through the list's pages from the top right corner of the list.

The way you can filter the list is unchanged, with the exception of the fact that you can now see how many entries in your list fit with your selected filters.

When no filters are selected, the number represents the total number of entries on the list ( that can be shown, considering the visibility settings in place for your organization )

This will soon be in place for the People > Departments list and People > Employee groups list, as well.

This month brings another series of updates to the Accrued vacation feature, part of the Vacation module, including:

1. Improved support for Notifications for vacation requests

This update ensures that you will be notified as soon as one of your employees sends a vacation request and, in turn, that they will know right away whether their request has been approved or denied.

The notifications arrive in your message Inbox and can be read from both the Planday app and the web client.

Depending on the response to your request, the message will contain a note from the approving manager and a balance update (when the request is approved)
Here's an example of the message from an approved vacation request notification:

2. Support for filtering vacation accounts based on availability

In your Absence accounts overview list, from Schedule > Absence accounts, you can now filter out the Absence accounts that do not have an active spending period.

This means that through the Active filter, the list will only show you the Absence accounts that your employees can request vacation from (within the account balance requirements set for your organization).

3. Added "Valid from" & "Valid until" columns for the Absence accounts list

Under Schedule > Absence accounts you can find the list of Absence accounts assigned to your employees. This overview list will now also show you information about the validity period of a given account, including both the accruing period and the spending period (if they differ).

For instance, the Valid from column can help you sort the list based on accounts that are currently in use or accounts that will become active at a later point (but from which employees can still request vacation, to fit with their future plans).

4. Added a Do not use option for Vacation earnings

When setting up template Absence accounts (or editing an existing one), you can now simply choose the Do not use option if no payout should be attached to an employee's vacation.

This replaces the necessity to set a fixed rate of 0, for Vacation earnings to be ignored.

As a reminder, Vacation earnings are part of the account configuration from Settings > Absence, Overtime, Vacation > Account types > Accrued vacation.

5. Support for turning off automatic renewal for Absence accounts.

You can now choose whether an Absence account should renew automatically or simply become inactive after the spending period is over.

For example, this can be useful for account templates used for seasonal/temporary employees or used for transition periods that arise due to changes in regulation.

To configure this, you'll need to do so on the account template from Settings > Absence, Overtime, Vacation > Account types where you can choose to edit an existing account or create a new one.

The option to toggle off Renew automatically will be available in both cases.

By default, users with Admin and Schedule manager permission levels were able to approve Shifts and Punch clock entries, which included their own (whenever the case). With this update, this behavior will be restricted and no longer set as default.

Please note, this update will not affect existing configurations made to accommodate this behavior. This means that this will remain unchanged if the current setup for your organization allows your managers to approve their own entries.

When the restriction is in place, managers will no longer be able to approve their own entries as they will not be shown in the list of entries pending approval, both on the Planday app or through the web client.

If this is something that you find necessary for your organization and it's not already enabled, please reach out to our support team (from the messenger icon in the bottom right corner) for assistance.

Make sure to use the latest versions available for Android (6.12.0) or iOS (6.12.0).

The most recent update for the Planday app brings you:

Coming soon: Messages update

With the next version of the app, you might notice a few changes in the Messages part of the Planday app.

The upcoming changes add stability and performance improvements to messaging while aligning the messaging options available through the app with those already existing through the web client.

This update includes the addition of:

- Required reply: which allows the sender to highlight the importance of their message and request an answer.

- Opened/Not opened: messages sent to multiple receivers will allow the sender to see whether their message has been read by everyone on the list or not.

- Reply all: allowing group and thread messaging

- Attachments: of Photos or Files (of max. 50Mb combined)

- Forward: which allows the sender to redistribute a message, including the original attachments, when necessary.

The changes for Messages are expected to be gradually released starting with Android version 6.13.0 and iOS version 6.13.0.

Android - version 6.12.0

iOS - version 6.12.0

Make sure to use the latest version available for iPad Kiosk App (1.4.0)

Lastly, we'd like to wish you a perfect holiday season, be it quiet and relaxing or busy and profitable.

In the hopes that 2021 will be a better year, we wish you "Happy holidays and A happy new year!"